In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Sections 251 and 255 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 require telephones to be accessible to people with disabilities. People who are protected by these laws include individuals who are blind, individuals with low vision, and individuals who are deaf (who typically use a TDD or TTY device in conjunction with their telephone).
Within the prior art, for people who are blind, it is well known to convert visual status indicators of station-specific telephony functions (here after referred to as phone status information) to audio output. Phone status information includes, but is not limited to, caller identification (name and number), call operations, telephony terminal states, and notification that a new voicemail message has arrived.
The prior art has provided the audio information for phone status information by utilizing special hardware to perform voice synthesis. The reliance on specialized hardware has several drawbacks, including:
(1) These hardware adjuncts tend to be very expensive, in part because the overall market is relatively small, but chiefly because different telephones require different versions of the adjunct.
(2) It can be extremely difficult and expensive, if not impossible, to customize the output of these adjuncts in order to satisfy user-specific or environment-specific needs. An example of such a customization would be the ability for users to specify the circumstances and frequency with which certain types of information should be voiced-out automatically.
(3) These adjuncts derive the phone status information by monitoring the signals that are being transmitted to the telephone. After a signal has been transmitted to the phone, illustratively caller ID information or an indication that there is new voicemail, the associated information is no longer accessible to the adjunct—and therefore no longer accessible to the blind user.
For people with low vision, the solutions that are available to people who are blind are often less-than-optimal. This is because, when people are using a telephone, it is undesirable to provide status information by audio output unless it is absolutely necessary. To accommodate the needs of low-vision users, the preferred approach is to present the phone status information visually in an enlarged format, using a display device that permits the users to adjust the color and contrast settings. These capabilities exist within the prior art, but with the same drawbacks and limitations described previously for the blind-oriented audio-output solutions.
For people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (who typically use a TDD or TTY device in conjunction with their telephone), a significant problem is that they often cannot tell when they have an incoming call unless they are looking at the phone when the call arrives. Within the prior art for analog telephones, of the sort typically found in people's homes, the use of stroboscopic flashers that respond to a “ring signal” on the phone line is well known. No such devices exist for digital or IP telephones, not because they are technically infeasible, but because the use of proprietary signaling protocols in these systems makes it impractical to build a single device that could accommodate the market. For users who have digital or IP telephones, the solution that is recommended by the US Access Board is to run a separate analog line to the user's desk, put an analog stroboscopic flasher on the line, and then administer the phone and the flasher-equipped analog line as bridged line appearances. (With this configuration, the strobe flashes whenever the phone has an incoming call.) This solution tends to be expensive, and does not lend itself well to the needs of a mobile workforce.
Many of the above-described problems are addressed by the previously incorporated patent applications. However, within the context of recent technical advances and recent shifts in market pressures, the solutions proposed in these previously incorporated patent applications are not entirely adequate where the proposed solutions utilize the techniques of a monitoring adjunct that tracks the status of the telephone via a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) login into the telephone itself.
Whereas the previously incorporated patent applications using the CTI approach solved many of the deficiencies of the prior art, the technical advances and recent shifts in market pressures still present the problems of:
(1) A problem with the CTI approach is that standard digital and analog telephones do not permit CTI logins, thereby limiting this solution to IP telephones. Even with IP phones, support for CTI logins is being curtailed at many locations because of fears that they represent a potential security risk for the IP network.
(2) In addition, the displays of many recent telephones are “paged.” Illustratively, on a telephone that can display the status of 36 different functions, it might be possible to display only 12 functions at a time. A user would select “page 1” to show the status of functions 1-12, “page 2” for functions 13-24, and “page 3” for functions 25-36. By virtue of how the CTI mechanisms of the prior art monitor the phone's status, a change that occurs on a page other than the one that is being displayed cannot be detected by the monitoring adjunct. It is not reasonable to expect blind people to keep track of the “page” being displayed visually by their telephone.